“In a parabola, the velocity is inversely as the square root of the ratio of the distance of the body from the focus of the figure; it is more variable in the ellipse, and less in the hyperbola, than according to this ratio. For (by Cor. II, Lem. XIV) the perpendicular let fall from the focus on the tangent of the parabola is as the square root of the ratio of the distance. In the hyperbola, the perpendicular is less variable; in the ellipse, more.”

It wasn’t entirely original; the Greeks had been pondering some of the points centuries before. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy urges in its article on the book, “The idea of developing a mathematical theory in order to enable experiment and observation to provide theory-mediated answers to questions did not originate with the Principia.”

And it wasn’t entirely leakproof, of course; had it been, Albert Einstein might have kept on working as a patent clerk until retirement. But when Isaac Newton first proposed his new physics—legendarily the product of a bonk on the head with an apple, or at the very least the vision of an apple falling from tree to ground—in July 1687 with the publication of Principia Mathematica, he set in motion a scientific revolution that is still unfolding today. As the Encyclopaedia Britannicaarticle devoted to him rightly says, the book “…is not only Newton’s masterpiece but also the fundamental work for the whole of modern science.”

The history of the Principia is peppered with familiar names—and some not so familiar ones as well. Edmond Halley, whose name graces the comet that dips in from the Oort Cloud every four generations, helped sharpen the argument so much that Newton dedicated the book to him. Robert Hooke served as such a bete noire that his very being animated Newton to work for decades out of spite. And then there was Gottfried Leibniz, with whom Newton was locked in an epic rivalry. Add to Newton’s interactions with these men and others the context of a Europe wrought by wars over faith and empire and an England still broken by its recent civil wars, and the Cambridge professor’s accomplishment becomes even more pronounced.

It’s a book whose making is surprisingly full of drama. To honor the 325th anniversary of the publication of Newton’s masterwork (July 5, 1687), Cambridge has published a digital edition of the text. (Noteworthy is the imprimatur on the ninth page, issued a full year before by the famed administrator and even more famed diarist Samuel Pepys.) We pay our respects by pausing to think of his book’s impact on generations of scientists to come, who, with Sir Isaac Newton, have sought what he called a “truer method of philosophy.”